The ten-point checklist before any quote leaves your outbox

Pilots with thirty years of experience still run the pre-flight checklist, because the checklist is not about skill, it is about the day your attention is elsewhere. A quote is a legal offer and a margin commitment written at speed, usually at night. These ten checks take five minutes and catch the mistakes that cost real money.

The money checks

1. Walk the job in your head against the lines

Close your eyes and build the project from the ground up: dig, foundations, structure, shell, first fix, plaster, second fix, decorate, clean. At each stage, is there a line in the quote for it? This mental walk-through is the single best catch for the forgotten scope, the missing lintel, the skip that nobody priced. Most of the classic margin killers are omissions, not miscalculations.

2. Check the arithmetic pipeline, not just the total

Spreadsheet errors hide in the middle: a rate against the wrong unit, a quantity typed into the wrong row, a subtotal that stopped summing when a line was inserted. Spot-check three lines end to end, then confirm the sections add to the total. A deterministic pricing tool makes this class of error structurally impossible, which is one honest reason to use one.

3. Confirm the prelims exist and are sized to the programme

Scaffold weeks, welfare, supervision, skips, insurances. If the quote has no visible site-cost allowance, you are paying for them out of margin. If it has one, sanity-check it against how long the job will really take, not how long you would like it to.

4. Look at the margin line and say it out loud

Not the markup, the margin: what is actually left for the business after labour, materials, plant, prelims and overheads. If you would be embarrassed to say the number to your accountant, do not send it to the client.

The protection checks

The money checks protect this month. The protection checks protect the next six, because they decide what happens when something changes or goes wrong. They cost nothing when the job runs smoothly, and they quietly earn their keep the first time a client says "I thought that was included".

5. Read the exclusions list as the client's lawyer would

Everything you are not doing should be written down: decoration, landscaping, building control fees, unforeseen ground conditions, whatever applies. The test is simple: if this job goes wrong, does the document answer the question "was that included?" without a phone call. The craft of writing these is covered in exclusions and assumptions.

6. State the assumptions about what you cannot see

Sound slab, standard foundations, services where the drawings say they are. An assumption written in the quote is a conversation; an assumption in your head is a dispute waiting for a date.

7. Attach a payment schedule tied to milestones

Deposit, stage payments at defined points, final balance on completion. Every stage should be small enough that neither side is dangerously exposed if the relationship fails at that moment.

8. Set the validity window and the VAT position

Materials move, diaries fill, and a quote with no expiry is a price you have offered forever. Thirty days is common. And be explicit whether the total includes VAT, because ambiguity there is a five-figure misunderstanding on a big job.

The presentation checks

9. Read the scope summary as a stranger

Could someone who has never visited the site understand what is being built, roughly how long it will take, and what happens next? Clients forward quotes to partners and parents. The document sells you in rooms you are not in, which is why presentation is a price signal.

10. Check the small facts that torpedo credibility

Client name spelled correctly. Right address on the right quote. Today's date, your company details, contact information that works. A quote addressed to the previous client is the cheapest possible way to lose a £90,000 job.

When the checklist says do not send

Sometimes the five minutes surfaces something bigger than a typo: a margin that only works if nothing goes wrong, an assumption you cannot actually defend, a client who has already shown signs of being expensive to work for. The checklist's most valuable output is occasionally the decision to pause. Sleeping on a marginal quote costs twelve hours; winning it can cost three months. If two or more checks fail on the same document, treat that as a signal about the job, not just the paperwork, and re-read the numbers in daylight before committing. The most profitable sentence in construction is still "thanks, but this one is not for us", used sparingly and politely.

Make the checklist mostly automatic

Notice that checks one, two and three are structural: they fail when quotes are assembled by hand from memory. Producing the quote from a measured bill of quantities makes the walk-through visible, the arithmetic deterministic and the prelims explicit by default. That is how QS Quoter builds every quote: describe the job or upload the drawings, and it prices the full bill at your own rates, with a client copy, a private cost copy showing your margin, and every line editable. The five-minute checklist then becomes what it should be: a final human look, not a rescue operation.